Bento Life

These remind me of eating a sandwich, only without the bread! The best part is that no specialty ingredients are required to make them.

Ham Onigiri with Lettuce Wraps
Adapted from Onigiri Cafe 2

To make the onigiri:
1 cup to 2 cups of cooked rice
3/4 to 1 slice of deli ham

Increase or decrease the portions according to your needs and tastes.

First, start by dicing up the ham into small pieces. The smaller the better.

Mix the ham in a bowl with the rice. If you’re going to use an onigiri mold instead of using salty palms to mold your rice, add in a little bit of salt to the rice as you mix. Divide the rice in half and form each half into a triangle, using the salty palms method or an onigiri mold. Bob & Angie has a tutorial on making onigiri shapes, and I don’t know why, but it makes more sense to me than other illustrations I’ve seen.

(Lettuce wraps and additional notes on rice under the cut.)
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Main: Gochujang Chicken
Sides: Soy and Ginger Cucumber, Blanched Gai Lan, Carrot Stick with Miso Sesame Dip
Plus: Brown and White Rice

If you’ve read my about page, you will note that I state my goal is to make "balanced" bento. For me, an ideally balanced traditional-style bento would include rice, veggies and protein of the following approximate proportions:

Rice: Slightly less than half of the bento. In double-tier bento, I fill the smaller tier with rice. In single-tier bento, I usually just go by a visual measurement.

Next, I divide the remaining space roughly in half.

Veggie: Half (or more) of the remaining space. I like two or three small veggie dishes to fill up this space. If three dishes sounds like a lot of prep work in the morning, let me assure that they are usually simple dishes or things that I can make ahead of time.

Protein: Half (or less) of the remaining space. One protein, or main dish, consisting of meat, fish, eggs, tofu and so on.

Extras: Sometimes I will include items that don’t fall into any of the above groups. This includes items like fruit, cheese, furikake and so on.

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Main: Beef topped red pepper
Sides: Soy marinated broccoli, garlic lotus root
Plus: Brown and white rice, umeboshi, black sesame seeds

You can’t tell with this lunch, but when I moved a bought a toaster oven. Now I use my real oven to store my pots and pans. It’s great for bento because it heats up in no time at all!

I shall leave you this thought: Everything tastes better when it’s sauteed with garlic.

Main: Egg and cucumber salad
Sides: Baby green salad, curry carrots and bacon
Plus: Herb bread, raspberry vinaigrette for salad

I’m back! Did you guys miss me? Geez, over a week without the internet is too long. (You know you’re an addict when…)

I have to admit that I wasn’t making bento much over the move, if not mostly due to the fact that I lacked for food in the house. Even if I’m walking distance from work now (and how awesome is that!), I’m still planning on taking bento everyday since it’s a touch too far to walk and make it back in time for the end of lunch.

Speaking of things that are awesome, Biggie from lunchinabox.net was interviewed for an article in Newsweek about bento! As Biggie mentions in her post (not the interview), I’m not entirely convinced that bento are becoming as trendy outside of Japan as the article makes it out to be. However, bento does seem to be a happy confluence of several things that do seem to be popular right now - eating healthier, being greener, and all things Asian - which could very well propel it into popularity. I don’t think I’d mind seeing bento become commonplace, I’m just sure it’s a trend. Yet. (Also, not all the people who make bento are making them for their kids…)

Main: Tarako tamagoyaki
Sides: Mayo dressed cucumber, carrot kinpira
Plus: Brown and white rice with hijiki, shirasu and umeboshi

I’m moving this weekend, so understandably I’m a little crunched for time! I shall return after I secure an internet connection at my new place. Until then, I leave you with this lunch.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll be able to see them, but I won’t be able to make any new posts until I have my new ‘net connection.

It occured to me that I never really explained what ku:nel is in my post about Watashi-tachi no Obento. Ku:nel is a Japanese natural lifestyle magazine published by Magazine House. Ku:nel is short for kuu neru, which means "eat sleep." With a name like that, it is not surprising that much of the magazine is dedicated to food.

In every issue, Ku:nel runs a two page segmant called Every Day My Bento which, I believe, features reader submitted bento lunches. These are the kinds of lunches that you are likely to find in Every Day My Bento, as well as Watashi-tachi no Obento. They’re all from May 1 issue of Ku:nel.

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Green Peas Onigiri

This is an updated recipe that I originally posted on flickr.

1 cup to 2 cup cooked rice (depending how much rice you want)
2 Tbsp cooked green peas
Salt for palms

Combine the peas and the rice in a bowl.

Divide the rice mix into half. Sprinkle some salt into your clean, damp hands. Take one half of the rice and use your hands to shape it into a ball. Repeat the shaping process for the other half of the rice.

Bob & Angie has a tutorial on how to make various shapes of onigiri. Personally, I think the ball is the easiest, so if you think it’s impossible to make onigiri by hand, start with the ball onigiri! You’ll be make triangular onigiri in no time! And once you get the hang of hand molding onigiri, it’s actually faster than using a mold. Other benefits include not being stuck to a specific volume of rice, so you can make smaller or larger onigiri as you wish.

Main: Curry fried rice
Sides: Broad beans, grilled red pepper

Boy, I feel like it’s been a while! Actually, I seemed to have a bit of a stomach bug last week, so the last thing I wanted to do was write about food. Phew, but I’m back and feeling much better now.

So basically, when I saw a recipe for curry fried rice one of my bento books, I knew that I had to make it ASAP. I love curry and I love fried rice, but it had never occurred to me to combine the two. This is good both hot and cold, meaning that you can make it the night before and have it for lunch the next day. (And trust me, if you like curry, you won’t mind eating this two days in a row.)

By the way, if you were wondering what those green bean shaped deals on the cover of Watashi-tachi no Obento are, they are broad beans/fava beans. To be honest, I just never ate them growing up, so I didn’t know what they looked like until recently. That is what they look like fully shelled, but sometimes I don’t have time in the morning so I just leave them in their shell, like above.

(Recipe for curry fried rice under the cut.)

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Watashi-tachi no Obento

Watashi-tachi no Obento is a photography collection of bento which originally ran in Ku:nel’s Everyday My Obento. Most of the book is taken up with pictures of bento prepared by 47 different people, each with commentary by the preparer. This is a fabulous book for people interested in what kind of bento the average Japanese person would prepare. A wide variety of bento are present in this book, including bento with mostly Japanese food, sandwich bento, and one picnic bento.

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Main: Tarako spaghetti
Sides: Steamed broccoli, strawberries

Tarako tarako tarako! This is a quick lunch I made using a tarako spaghetti mix, microwave steamed broccoli, and fresh strawberries. Tarako is cod roe and you can use it mixed with pasta, or add into tamagoyaki, or even as an onigiri filling. Those tiny pink dots you can almost make out in the picture is the tarako.

I made this entire lunch while waiting for the noodles to cook. First I put on a pot of water and while I waited for that to heat up, I grilled some thin sliced red peppers and sliced up a green onion. I steamed some broccoli in the microwave by adding a bit of water into a microwave safe dish, covering it, and cooking it for about a minute. Once the noodles were done, I tossed them with the tarako sauce mix, the green onions, and the grilled red peppers.

Next time, I think I’ll use actual tarako instead of a mix, but I went with the mix this time because actual tarako is expensive. My Asian grocery has a pretty good selection of pasta sauce packets with the noodles. Actual tarako is often found in the freezer section with the other frozen fish. You can make plain salted tarako spaghetti (like I did) or you can buy mentaiko which is spicy.

Edit: More fun with tarako!
Here is a a recipe for tarako spaghetti.

Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go (by Naomi Kijima) has a recipe for tarako furikake as well.